Dataset National Physician Database (NPDB)

Name:

National Physician Database (NPDB)

Data Provider (source):

Canadian Institute for Health Information

Description:

The National Physician Database (NPDB) was established in 1987 by the deputy ministers of health and transferred to CIHI in 1995. The NPDB provides information on demographic characteristics of physicians, physician payments and physicians’ level of activity within Canada’s health care system. You can find out more about physicians, including reports and analyses based on NPDB data.

NPDB data is submitted from provincial and territorial medical health care insurance plans using a standardized set of data elements. The National Grouping System is used to group together fee codes from billings data into 121 standardized categories. Billings by physicians in Canada for health care services are detailed at the individual physician level as well as for patient sex and age groupings. Information on physicians’ non-billings payments is collected at both the individual physician level and an aggregate level.

In addition to the CIHI data access condition below, requests for Quebec data are subject to review and authorization from the Quebec Privacy Commission (Commission d’accès à l’information du Québec) and the Québec Ministry of Health and Social Services (MSSS).

CIHI discloses health information and analyses on Canada’s health system and the health of Canadians in a manner consistent with its mandate and core functions. These disclosures typically fall into one of four categories:

Disclosures to parties with responsibility for the planning and management of the health care system to enable them to fulfill those functions;

Disclosures to parties with a decision-making role regarding health care system policy to facilitate their work;

Disclosures to parties with responsibility for population health research and/or analysis; and

Prior to disclosure, CIHI reviews the requests to ensure that the disclosures are consistent with the above and meet the requirements of applicable legislation.

CIHI data disclosures are made at the highest degree of anonymity possible while still meeting the research and/or analytical purposes. This means that, whenever possible, data are aggregated.

Where aggregate data are not sufficiently detailed for the research and/or analytical purposes, data that have been de-identified using various de-identification processes may be disclosed to the recipient on a case-by-case basis and where the recipient has entered into a data protection agreement or other legally binding instrument with CIHI.

Only those data elements necessary to meet the identified research or analytical purposes may be disclosed.

Requires the recipient to comply with any other provision that CIHI deems necessary to further safeguard the data.

Prior to the disclosure of de-identified data for research purposes, the requester will provide CIHI with evidence of Research Ethics Board approval.

CIHI reserves the right to impose any other requirement(s) as needed on a case-by-case basis in order to maintain the confidentiality of de-identified data.

Prior to disclosure, program areas will evaluate the de-identified data to assess and subsequently minimize privacy risks of re-identification and residual disclosure, and to implement the necessary mitigating measures to manage residual risks.

CIHI will not disclose de-identified data if it is reasonably foreseeable in the circumstances that it could be utilized, either alone or with other information, to identify an individual and that, where it is reasonably foreseeable that it could be used to identify an individual, the information will be treated as personal health information.